Modern electronic design (e.g., IC package designs, printed circuit board or PCB designs, etc.) often include multi-layered structures to increase or maximize the available space. Accompanying the increasingly popular use of multi-layered structured structures is the analysis of the electromagnetic filed for the electronic product. Three-dimensional (3D) approaches modeling the structures and analyzing the electromagnetic field domain in the three-dimensional space may be used to solve the problem yet requires long and often prohibitively long runtime to reach some reasonably accurate solutions. Pseudo-3D or two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5D) approaches have also been widely used due to their expediency in reaching reasonably accurate solutions. These pseudo-3D approaches pose a different set of problems with modern multi-layered electronic designs because these approaches reduce some of the three-dimensional features with the two-dimensional modeling and may thus erroneously model, for example, a short circuit into an open circuit in electronic designs having certain configurations.
For example, an electromagnetic field between two metal shapes are modeled only inside the parallel plate field domain between two metal shapes in conventional pseudo-3D modeling or analysis tools. That is, the electromagnetic field is modeled only in the overlapping region between the two metal shapes when viewed from the plane perpendicular to the planes on which the two metal shapes reside. This pseudo-3D modeling techniques create two disconnected field domains even when the respective structures creating these two field domains are electrically connected to each other. FIG. 1 illustrates a simplified representation of such a problem. In the configuration shown in FIG. 1B, conventional pseudo-3D approaches model the electromagnetic field domains only between two parallel plates, and thus the field domains only exist in the region 108B between parallel plates 104B and 102B as well as in the region 110B between parallel plates 102B and 106B. These two field domains will be treated as disconnected whereas the circuit structures creating these two field domains are electrically connected.
Conventional approaches then solve the disconnected field domain issue by inserting a single floating plane to cover the entire area of the electronic design to avoid such disconnected field domains. These approaches may effectively solve the disconnected field domain issues, but they also introduce another class of issues. By covering the entire area of the electronic design with a single floating plane to provide continuity paths for disconnected field domains that should have been connected, the introduction of the single floating plane and modeling the floating plane as a metal plane to provide continuity disturbs the electronic design to an extent that often leads to inaccurate results in analyses of electrical properties (e.g., inductance, capacitance, etc.) and the electromagnetic fields.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer program product for implementing or devising an electronic design with disconnected field domains to address various shortcomings and disadvantages of conventional approaches.